Project Nex, an eSport focused arena FPS in the works

I’ve been following the developpement of NexFPS (or Project Nex) for a while now and feel like it has great potential to be the next “big” arena FPS (think about League of Legends for the Moba genre). The team developping it has some great talents and have a really interesting vision of the genre and how to make it accessible, fun, hard to master and enjoyable to watch at the same time. Keep in mind that what will follow is based on my own reading and thinking, on diverse website or media and it may not be entirely accurate, the game, pictures and footage are still in pre-alpha state as i publish this. I’ll be talking about it here as they plan on releasing an editor, so i may Map for it.
Enjoy the read 🙂

First of all, the team behind it are great people, i’ve been able to chat with some of them on IRC and they are really open on the project, while keeping their focus on what they think is important for the game instead of carving on what others tells them (like esr trashing the game because it’s not quake, despite all the attempts to revive Quake that all more or less failed). They are open on discussing ideas and concepts though, so if you think you have something great and well thought for the game and you can defend your point, make it known (links at the end of the post).
If you’re into UT, you probably know about Captain Flaccid who’s behind great maps for UT3 (DM-Deck-Pro2, DM-Lea-Pro or DM-1on1-Pure-Pro2 for example), knows a lot on the theory to make a great map and knows how to apply it. I really like the fact that he is currently behind the map design of Project Nex as that promises some great stuff.
For what i read and saw, they seems to go for HOLP style maps, with clean look and nothing to hinder movement or the ability to spot your opponents easily, which is a major point for eSport in my opinion.

On gameplay, they are going for something new, with an energy system, which you can use for trick moves, shield, some weapons and probably other stuff. The energy management will be a big part of the game, giving you lots of choice depending on the situation (movement, fight and so on). The special movements as of now are Dodge, Wall-Dodge, Wall-Run, Wall-Clamp, Lift-jump, Rocket-Jump and limited Bunny Hopping for burst speed gain. They all use energy (probably not Dodge and Rocket/Lift-jump, i’m not sure though) so you can’t just spam them all over the place, which adds a layer to master on the map-control and awareness as you don’t want to run out of energy at the bad moment.
The movements should be quite easy to pull-out but the good use of them and the energy should give a big advantage to the better player.
They are also experimenting on new kind of pickups, related to energy instead of classic armors, but i don’t know much about it.

Most of the difficulty and progression should come from the complexity of the weapons. There’s not much on it yet but the shield gun, which at the moment absorbs projectiles at the cost of energy for primary fire and does the same but can reflect projectiles as secondary.

The goal of the game is to bring old players and new players together behind some good frags and a strong eSport community. The team plan on multiple things to achieve that :

A ladder with seasons and matchmaking system (with some sort of ELO rating probably) on Duel and 4v4 CTF modes.

A custom game mode, in which you can do whatever sort of game you want, with classic game modes and community ones.

A way of viewing currently or previously played games easily and strong viewer/caster tools.

Free to play multiplayer with paid options for visual stuff like skins (read : no pay to win) and a paid Solo mode (first level will be free)

Good tutorials for new players (i read something on it but can’t find it anywhere, maybe IRC so nothing officially announced)

Concerning mods and maps, they achieved Steam Greenlight, so i guess they will go with Steam workshop to distribute easily the player-made custom content. They want to allow the best community maps in the ladders’ rotation, which should encourage quality mapping. I feel like that can makes the difference.

We aim to roll out the first stage of playable multiplayer beta in September 2014, with a December 2014 release date scheduled.

If you want to know more here are some links or you can just head over reddit, IRC or use the official website’s contact form to get directly in touch with the team.